Monday… well, it’s a holiday

Iran tests another missile?

Keep your eyes on a niche company, RocketLab. Not exactly a household name, but they do some interesting stuff.

You know those gee-whiz hypersonic missiles everyone is all about? Gotta test that stuff somehow – pushing a chunk of aluminum and titanium through the atmosphere at 5000mph is going to generate a lot of heat friction.

The space stock recently announced the Cassowary Vex mission — complete with the cheeky launch nickname “That’s Not A Knife” — is set to lift off no earlier than late February from Rocket Lab’s Wallops Island, Va., launch site.

This will be Rocket Lab’s fourth hypersonic test mission for the military in under six months, deploying the DART AE hypersonic demonstrator drone from Australia’s Hypersonix Launch Systems. The quick cadence of these flights shows how Rocket Lab is helping accelerate the U.S. military’s hypersonic capabilities, while quickly establishing its role as the defense industry’s go-to launch partner for next-generation technology.

They are expected to use their own HASTE launch system modified for high speed rather than payload and can reach speeds of Mach 20. That would be, what, roughly 4 miles per second? 

This setup lets customers, such as government agencies and private companies, test their tech in real high-speed conditions repeatedly, without the huge cost of a full orbital mission.

The star of the show is DART AE — short for Delta-Velocity Autonomous Reusable Test – Airframe Experiment — a sleek, 3D-built, self-piloting hypersonic test vehicle built by Hypersonix. It’s about 10 feet long, weighs around 660 pounds, and is designed to fly at Mach 7 — about 5,300 mph — for distances up to 620 miles.

What makes it special is its engine: the SPARTAN scramjet, which burns hydrogen fuel. Unlike traditional jet engines, a scramjet works best at very high speeds — it lights itself, can turn on and off multiple times for more flexible flight paths (not just a straight ballistic arc), and produces no carbon emissions.Yahoo Finance

All the science fiction we are living just boggles the mind…

And remember when we talked about Canada’s vaunted ban on assault weapons and government mandated confiscation buyback program? Six years in the making, blown well past its original budget, and they still have next to no participation from gun owners to show for it. But they still say they will finish it by the end of this year. In at least three provinces, that could be interesting.

Complicating the buyback is the fact that Canada has plenty of guns, more than the program alone can collect. The federal government estimates that it has the funds to buy 136,000 firearms, but Canada has roughly 2 million registered and 10 million unregistered guns, according to a 2017 release from the Small Arms Survey, an independent research group based in Switzerland.

The buyback has also been met with friction in western Canada. The province of Alberta has said it won’t participate in the buyback and barred its police forces from taking part. Saskatchewan and Manitoba have also said they won’t participate.

So they are underbudgeted, have no cooperation from local police, and think 2,500 banned types of weapons are going to be easy to find? Oh, and here is the buyback by price:

Category	Proposed Compensation Amount (in Canadian Dollars)
AR Platform	$1,337
Cx4 Storm	$1,317
CZ Scorpion	$1,291
M14 Rifle	$2,612
Robinson Armament	$2,735
Ruger Mini-14	$1,407
SG550 and SG551	$6,209
SIG Sauer MCX, MPX	$2,369
VZ.58	$1,139
Firearms with a bore diameter of 20 mm or greater	$2,684
Firearms with a muzzle energy >10,000 Joules	$2,819

Category: "The Floggings Will Continue Until Morale Improves", Canada, Science and Technology